Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the finest Arthurian
romance in Middle English, survives in a single manuscript, British
Library, Cotton Nero A. x. The anonymous author of Gawain
probably also wrote the three other poems extant in the same
manuscript: Pearl (q.v.), Cleanness (q.v.) and
Patience (q.v.). The manuscript was copied around 1400, not
very long after the Cotton Nero poems were composed. The evidence
from dialect is that the poet came from Cheshire or Staffordshire.
The poem is written in alliterative long lines, arranged into
stanzas of variable length. All stanzas end in a bob (a two- or
three-syllable line) preceded by a wheel (here a quatrain), the bob
and wheel rhyming ababa. The corpus o…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are not a subscriber, please click here to read about membership. All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors.

Citation:
Putter, Ad. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight".
The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 March 2001
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2056, accessed 03 March 2015.]

Related Groups

2056Sir Gawain and the Green Knight3Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

The Literary Encyclopedia is supplied without charge to higher education institutions in countries where per capita income is below the world average. If you are in a relatively wealthy country, reading The Literary Encyclopedia and recommending it to others helps us to afford these free supplies.